Making better marketing decisions is a concern for every business, and creative professionals are always looking for new ways to get the most out of their marketing investments. According to Orbit Analytics, the primary function of business intelligence (often abbreviated as BI) is to mine new data pools, so as to seek out patterns that could be useful in future business strategies and longer-term decision-making. The patterns derived from these searches can then be parsed in greater depth for the purposes of forecasting upcoming trends, or even predicting specific business outcomes. Business Intelligence can help entrepreneurs make effective marketing decisions in a world of abundant information.
Technologies Source the Relevant Data
Emerging software technology gives businesses the opportunity to analyze data in ways that were never possible before. Machine learning, a computer science technology that enables computers to learn by analyzing data, is a powerful tool for understanding market trends and applying marketing predicatively. Increasingly, sourcing information isn’t the problem. It’s sorting through an endless sea of data.
Create Intuitive Visualizations
Software solutions that mine information targeted around pain-points can help create intuitive visualizations and develop a more effective marketing funnel. A key in making profitable BI decisions is interpreting data quickly from a wide range of different information sets. Software that enables data blending by joining data tables can help analysts understand the relationships between separate information sets by creating those intuitive visualizations.
Marketing Data is Refined Through Business Intelligence
Developing methods to automate information gathering and ease its interpretation is essential to creative entrepreneurs who are continually developing new applications for emerging technologies to create intuitive visualizations of marketing trends. Part of implementing useful business intelligence is using technology to track sales data, product development data, and financial data with other data sets that can enhance management and business performance. Relevant information is sourced from competing businesses to assess common practices and establish benchmarks.
Methodologies Produce Predictive Data and Create Opportunity
New trends are always going to be popping up, but you want to be one foot ahead of the competition. Development of a BI strategy is vital to enable future analysis as data continues to be sourced from market trends. Without a consistent methodology, analyzing data would be difficult. Good BI practices produce consistent data that can help refine those strategies. Developing a sound methodology can help to identify discrepancies between a business strategy and market research and helps to improve those systems through a process called gap analysis.
In today’s competitive marketplace, effectively implementing business-intelligence technologies is vital. As these technologies are increasingly utilized across the playing field, they will become a necessity if entrepreneurs wish to maintain a competitive foothold. While BI and marketing sometimes aren’t as seamless as they should always be, there are solutions being worked on everyday, to the point that not integrating BI and marketing will be necessary. That day will be here sooner rather than later.
